"Betye Saar was educated at the University of California, Los Angeles and at California State University in Long Beach and Northridge, graduating in 1966. Her artistic inspiration began in the 1930's when Betye visited her grandmother in Watts to watch Simon Rodia combine debris in the construction of the Watts Towers monument. Since then, in pursuit of communicating her uninhibited ideas, Saar has moved through several mediums; from printmaking to collage, from assemblage to sculpture and finally to installation work. She has incorporated sound, literature and theater into her art while searching within herself source.

Of mixed ancestry, Betye Saar has explored her African-American, Irish and Native American ethnicity in her art, informing the work with experiences, imagery and found objects. In 1968, Saar began constructing the fragments collected throughout her travels into a whole, weaving the threads of her cultural origins into a narrative form of assemblages. Themes of life, death and in between reoccur in the works- Saar sees an awareness of death as central to our existence, a reminder of life, matter and presence, waking and dreaming. Saar continued to transform and place discarded objects into a new context, changes the meaning, shifting the objects' power and personalizing what once was ordinary. Her constructions grew to the installation work of the late 1970s in which Saar delivered social and political messages through a haunting visual poetry." this web page